Q. In our TimePilot system we have 8 current employees and 17 former employees who no longer work for us. Can I delete their profiles without losing their pay information? If so, do I do it simply by deleting their profile under the profile setup menu?

A. This is why extracting your pay period is important. If, as we suggest, you’ve been extracting your pay periods, and every clock-in and clock-out by the former employees is included in the extracted periods (in other words, the former employees have no clock-ins or clock-outs in Current Transactions), then you can go ahead and delete the employee profiles. You’ve got it right: You’ll delete them by starting TimePilot Central, then clicking the “Setup” menu, then “Profile Setup.”

If you're using a Vetro system, you'll also need to update the clock with the changes you just made in TimePilot Central.

If you r Vetro is on a network, start Vetro Data Manager and right-click the image of the first Vetro clock. Choose “Network Functions” from the pop-up menu, then “Get User Setup from Clock.” Now right-click the clock’s image again, choose “Network Functions” and click “Transfer User Setup to Clock.” Completing those two steps ensures the clock is in sync with your software. Repeat the two-step process for each Vetro clock.

If you don’t have your Vetro clocks on a network—you use the USB drive to collect your data and bring it to your PC—the process is almost as easy. In Vetro Data Manager, click “Tools,” choose “USB Transfer Employee Setup to All Clocks…” and follow the on-screen instructions.

By the way, if there’s a chance you’ll re-hire any of the former employees (for instance, if they are seasonal workers), instead of deleting them now and recreating their profile later, you can uncheck the “Active” box on their Employee Profile screen. That will keep the software from recognizing them as active employees and the system will not record any of their clock-ins or clock-outs until they are “reactivated.”

Also, if an employee leaves your company in the middle of a pay period, setting his or her status to Inactive will prevent them from clocking in or out for the rest of the pay period but will leave their data intact.

Q. Once the data is downloaded from my Extreme or Vetro clock to my USB drive, can the files be emailed? Or does the USB drive have to physically go directly from the timeclock to the computer that runs TimePilot Central?

A. Yes, the files from the USB drive can be emailed. However, whoever receives the e-mail must copy the files onto to a USB drive to be able to import them into TimePilot Central.

Q. We’re using our Vetro clocks on our network. We’ve hired quite a few new employees in the last few days; how do I get their names on the clocks?

A. You’ll use Vetro Data Manager to transfer any changes you make in the software to the clocks in a quick two-step process. First—assuming you've already created the new employees' profiles in TimePilot Central—click the Setup menu in TimePilot Central and choose “Vetro Data Manager.”

The manager will start and display an image of each clock on your network. Right-click the image of the first Vetro clock. Choose “Network Functions” from the pop-up menu, then “Get User Setup from Clock.” Now right-click the clock’s image again, choose “Network Functions” and click “Transfer User Setup to Clock.” Completing those two steps ensures the clock is in sync with your software. Repeat the two-step process for each Vetro clock you wish to add the employees to in your network.

If you don’t have your Vetro clocks on a network—you use the USB drive to collect your data and bring it to your PC—the process is almost as easy. First, click the Setup menu in TimePilot Central and choose “Vetro Data Manager.” Then click “Tools,” choose “USB Transfer Employee Setup to All Clocks…” and follow the on-screen instructions.

Not just for women: The wristwatch was strictly a women's item in the early 1900s. Men carried pocket watches and some said they would "sooner wear a skirt as wear a wristwatch." That changed in World War I, when soldiers found pocket watches impractical and began attaching them to their wrists with a strap. Wristwatches aren't as popular as they were 20 or 30 years ago; ask anyone under 30 for the time and chances are they'll pull out their cell phone.

Speed reading: A few years ago, web site designers found that people wouldn't wait more than about four seconds for a page to appear on their screen. Since that study, people have become even more impatient: Now, thanks to broadband, if they don't see something on the screen within a quarter of a second, they tend to leave. “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” said Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft.

Whether you're a current or future TimePilot customer, we're glad to see you.

Every month we'll offer news about TimePilot products, tips on how to use them more efficiently, some of the "cool stuff" our employees have come across and a special deal available only to those who receive this newsletter!

In this issue:

TimePilot Q&A: Deleting employees and e-mailing data.

TimePilot Best Practices: The Backup-Restore Utility.

Cool Stuff: Gentle Alarm.

The Deal: Tech Support 25% off.

TimePilot Best Practices

The Backup-
Restore Utility

You’ve been using TimePilot for a while now, and there are dozens of extracted pay periods taking up space on your computer’s hard drive. But it’s just a fact of life that hard drives die. That’s why it’s important to back up your data, so that when (not if!) your drive dies and the data is no longer available, you’ll have a copy.

Backing up is as simple as copying your files to a USB drive, another hard drive, CD or DVD. TimePilot has a special program that makes this even easier: the Backup-Restore Utility. Here’s how to use it:

You’ll be asked to log in. Use the same username and password you use to log in to TimePilot Central.

You’ll see a screen like the one at right. There are three groups of choices, each in a different color.The first group (the green buttons) involves your Current Transactions—clock-ins and clock-outs that have not yet been extracted into a pay period. You can back them up to a USB drive, another hard drive, CD or DVD. You can also “restore” your Current Transactions. This means taking a backed-up copy of Current Transactions using them to replace the ones that are in the TimePilot database.
The second group (the yellow buttons) does the same things as above but involves only extracted pay periods.
The third group (the gray buttons) lets you delete backed up files or extracted pay periods.

For this article, we’ll go through two of the most common procedures: backing up your Current Transactions and backing up your extracted pay periods.

Backing up Current Transactions

When you click the Back Up Current Transactions button, the screen shown at right will appear.

At the top of the screen is the place where TimePilot will save the backed up file. Don’t want to put it there? Want to save it to a USB drive or external hard drive? Click the little folder image next to the Backup Location field and choose where you want to save the file. If you want to put the file on a CD or DVD, the simplest process is to save the file to your desktop and then burn it to the disk. For Microsoft's instructions on how to burn CDs and DVDs in Windows, click here.

Just below the Backup Location field is the Backup File Name field. You can accept the filename that TimePilot assigns to the backup or change it. Just make sure any new filename ends in “.BAK”

When you’re ready, click the “Backup Now” button.

The bottom half of the screen shows a list of backed up Current Transactions that are available at the Backup Location at the top of the screen. When one is highlighted, its creation date is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Backing up Extracted Pay Periods

You can also back up your extracted pay periods. Each backup includes the employee profiles that were in effect at the time of the extraction, so each gives you a snapshot of your company at that time.

When you click the “Back up Extracted Time Periods” button, the screen above will appear.

At the top of the screen is the Backup Location field, just as described in the previous section.

Below that is a drop-down list of the companies you have set up in TimePilot (most businesses will have just one listed). Choose the company whose extracted periods you want to back up.

The extracted periods will appear in the left box; click one to highlight it, then click “Back Up Selected Time Period.” The backup copy of the extracted pay period will be created, saved to the location you specified at the top of the box and added to the list of backed up pay periods in the box on the right.

Just $96.75!

Every once in a while, our employees come across “cool stuff.”
This is where they share their finds.

Gentle Alarm

If you have trouble waking up in the morning—and you have an Android phone—this may be the app for you.

This app uses sleep cycle science to wake you up when you’re ready—not just at a specified time. According to the developer, near the end of our night’s sleep, we alternate 30-minute periods of deep sleep and 30-minute periods of light sleep. If you’re awakened by a traditional alarm during a deep sleep cycle, you won’t feel particularly rested. But if you’re awakened during a light sleep cycle—even if it’s a half-hour earlier—you’ll feel better.

Let’s say you set your Gentle Alarm for a 7 a.m. wakeup. At 6:30 a.m., the App will play a fairly quiet alarm. If you’re in a light sleep cycle, you’ll wake up a half-hour early, but feel refreshed. If you’re in a deep sleep cycle, you’ll sleep right through the quiet alarm and be awakened by a louder alarm at 7 a.m. when you’re presumably in a light sleep cycle.

One of our employees has tried it and says it worked for him. The app costs $2.78 at the developer’s web site. Sorry, iPhone, Windows Phone and Blackberry users—no version for us yet.